


Peeping Tom

by Outis_of_the_Cave



Category: The Lighthouse (2019)
Genre: Farting, M/M, Masturbation, Missing Scene, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, your usual lighthouse tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:33:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22473406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Outis_of_the_Cave/pseuds/Outis_of_the_Cave
Summary: Thomas Wake keeps an eye on his favorite wickie.
Relationships: Thomas Wake/Ephraim Winslow
Comments: 5
Kudos: 55





	Peeping Tom

He's loathe to leave the light unattended, even if it is for only a moment, but someone has to keep an eye on the lad and there is no one else on this rock besides himself. Grumbling under his breath and shaking his hoary head, fumbling for the iron keys at his waist, he takes a final look over the railing and sees a solitary figure gliding over the dunes, towards the lone storehouse by the shore. That's a good lad, flying off on winged heels to take inventory, but why the sudden enthusiasm? Who instilled a wickie's heart in this boy's breast? The old keeper is tempted to fancy himself as the one who breathed propriety into this wayward lubber, Lord knows he's tried, but changing a man, shaping and molding him in your callused and veiny hands, is seldom so simple. This warrants an inquiry, me thinks, a clandestine investigation into the matter. He unlocks the grate, wincing at the squealing hinges (the boy can fix that, but then he'd be too close to the light…) and carries himself, lame leg and all, down the ladder. He locks the grate after him and goes down the spiraling staircase. How many times has he descended these steps? How many times has he ascended? When their was still color in his hair he'd count the steps, one by one, going up or down, and he doesn't quite remember when he stopped exactly. It was probably when the stairs, spinning as they do like grooves in a rifles' barrel, ceased bothering him and the light's rays washed away whatever malaise he'd carry up from the deep. And what of exhaustion? There was never any need to catch your breath whilst basking in its brilliance. Nothing can hide from the light: it scours a man inside and out, whatever he dredged up cannot resist it. The light reveals all. No man can fool it, nor flee from it. As soon as this trifle is over with the keeper will be alongside it anew—as it should be.

His landing is timely enough, or perhaps it just seems that way. Time becomes a rather superfluous thing when you spend so much time up in the sky. The horizon outside the dingy window is low and grey; the whitecaps of the roiling sea as conspicuous as porcelain crowns in a maw full of decaying teeth—this tells him everything he needs to know. He takes his coat off the rusty hook and heads out. A bracing westerly wind stirs the scarce weeds around his house and sends up biting gusts of sand. He'd prefer, exceedingly so, to be high in the air with his beaming mate, where he can glower over this blasted edifice of slimy stone and accumulating jetsam, taking his joy in watching the lighthouse,  _ his lighthouse _ , lacerating the encroaching murk with an inhuman relentlessness, again and again and again. But isn't he as lucid down here as he is up there? The periodic booming of the foghorn is nothing but a dull reverberation against his ears, and the crashing surf and seething foam are a natural accompaniment to his padding footsteps. Never before had he lived somewhere so harsh, yet so complementary to his peculiar mode of existence. Everything is as clear on the ground as it is in the clouds. For doesn't the light illuminate its foundations just as well? It is encased in its crystal palace, emboldened by the shimmering panes of spinning glass, its swirling luminescence bringing shape and form out of this crazed conglomeration of efflorescent elements. As above, so below. He trods on, shoulders hunched and head bowed against the westerlies. 

***

Did there ever live a cat on this here rock? Because it sounds like someone is strangling one inside the storehouse. He heard the whimpering on the way over, thinking it to be the disturbed air whistling in his ears, but now, standing before his destination, he listens to the kind of cacophony that can only be made by a moist and frenzied throat. Creeping heels first, Indian-like, even quieter than the swathes of marram rustling all around him, he approaches this rude shack with its queer emanations. In between two pale planks of wood is a gap that the lad was supposed to have caulked or otherwise boarded up—a dark little orifice framed by chipped paint and consigned to neglect. But not for long. He closes the distance and cranes forwards; the hole is at eye-level, and is neither too wide nor too small. It's perfect. He peers in, and what he spies among the outlines of casks and turgid shadows is no Maine Coon, but Ephraim Winslow jerking himself off. 

Anemic daylight pours through a small white square and highlights Winslow—who is facing the open window, but at an angle where the keeper can make out his shuddering profile. Winslow's big blue coat lies at his feet in a crumpled heap; the buttons are loose on his shirt, revealing a brawny chest covered in a sheen of perspiration, rising and falling with wave-like regularity. One hand working his prick, the other raised to a pair of eyes ready to blow out of his skull—holding something, obviously. The older man can imagine the trembling hand locked around...what? It's out of sight, his line of vision terminating at Winslow's wrist. But, by Neptune, how he can see everything else! So defined is Winslow's wan face in this half-light that it is like an ivory cameo in the silver case of a gentleman's pocket watch: staring down all the time in the world yet going nowhere. And the same can be said of I, me thinks, Thomas Wake. He lays an open palm against the wall and presses his bare brow against rough wood. 

Winslow's really going at it, polishing himself with a speed and urgency Wake never imagined him capable of, rubbing himself raw with desperation as if the sword of Damocles was hanging over his shoulders. A slick pink morsel in sooty hands, that’s what the boy is fondling, and nothing about his body evidences an end to this lewd display. His shirtsleeves are plastered to his arms, defining biceps made thick and taught through felling wood, whose strength was fueled by platefuls of griddle cakes and bacon, now replaced by an endless bounty of freshly caught lobster; his wet lips mouthing silent prayers to an obscene and unseen deity, begging for release. Indeed, there is little pleasure to be had within the space of these peeling partitions, amongst lifeless hardtack, salt pork and dried cod. His throat ceaselessly coils and uncoils, like a perspiring serpent, so incongruously alive here, and with each movement, each twitch of his Adam’s apple, a strangled mewling escapes his straining windpipe. It’s an animal noise fit for hounds. Aye, like a dog he is. Pleading to what must surely be a false idol in his uplifted hand for liberation from the vile force grasping him in its own no less loathsome grip—a hound whimpering for salvation. Pitiful, that’s what he is, pitiful, and all the more enticing for it. This is nothing at all like what Wake does when he’s alone with the light, taking his own private pleasure in admiring its coruscating firmament. A tin cup of spirits for company; the drink numbs the flesh, allowing him to last longer when he takes himself well in hand. There’s been occasions where he was languorously stroking himself all night long, letting his jism dribble down his claggy thighs and drip through the perforated metal floor. 

Wake’s trousers suddenly feel tight below the waistline. His nethers are all astir. He wonders how long he can last right now, and knows there’s only one way to find out.

He unbuttons his trousers and frees himself from his drawers, cringing at the influx of cool air. Wrapping his fingers around himself, shuffling them along his burgeoning prick for warmth, he digs the nails of his other hand into the wood, delightfully aware that this thin barrier, made so brittle by briny air and filed down by innumerable winds, is all that separates them. He doesn't even have to shout. All the keeper has to do is slap his hand against the wall and he'd scare the tar out of the boy—or at least what little there is inside the lubber. This provocative possibility excites him, and with a few more awkward tugs he hoists himself to full mast. But can anything short of divine intervention halt the boy now? Winslow's mewlings are climbing to a quivering crescendo; the spittle on his lips and chin are quicksilver traceries in the fading light, so bright and delicate where the muffled sunlight catches its smears and rivulets, glinting, catching what light there is like the budding pearl at the tip of his own prick ( _ Do you admire yerself, lad, as ye debase thyself? _ ). Wake, on the other hand, proves to be astonishingly sensitive without rum in his blood; in mere seconds he's on the verge of achieving a whole nights work. He'd half-expected this to be a nigh impossible task to carry out  _ au naturel _ , but if anything, it facilitates matters to an embarrassing degree. He remembered his first woman, a lady of the night in a rented room on Endicott, and how quickly he came ( _ Did they have women like that in yer little shanty town, Winslow? _ ). He had been ashamed then, but not now. That embarrassment happened to another man, in another world—the memory was only a stranger's dream. No past, no future, only the eternal present. What came before will come again. He feels the tide rising within himself, sees Winslow's head craning back, his spine arching, and the two of them keep on jerking themselves off, not one too different from the other ( _ Do ye see what I see? Feel what I feel? _ ). Wake groans, not caring whether or not Winslow hears him, a part of him perhaps hoping that he does hear, but whatever exclamation he makes is lost to the strangled cry wrenched from the boy's gullet. Wake wants to hold fast this personal agony that always precedes release, but there's no stopping it. The most precious things are those that are fleeting, after all. Wake's seed slaps against the wall and spills down to the coarse soil where it is hungrily swallowed up by the salted earth—an impromptu libation borne from lust, given freely to a natural indifference. 

The wind still blows, as brisk as ever; an interminable procession of cloud rolls over itself; the beachgrass horripilates under the damp chill, their wavering stalks speckled by spray. The sun, suffused as it is through the grey gauze of an overcast sky, is fading. And still the foghorn calls out to what cannot be seen, and the waves crash and roil, relentlessly, ceaselessly. As they always have and will until the advent of a perpetually postponed day of judgement. 

( _ To ye, Winslow, to ye. _ )

Wake's sick of this nonsense, he's tired of it all. With sobriety comes an encroaching weariness. He retires from the peephole and hitches up his trousers while Winslow does so too—the keeper can hear the jangle of the boy's suspenders. As soon as he's done he sets off for the lighthouse, retreating under the auspices of a faint sun wavering in the drab heavens.

***

Winslow finds Wake snoring in his union suit, all curled up and content in the cramped bedroom they share. The salty son of a bitch is so lazy that he hasn't even bothered to spread clean linen over himself; he sleeps and farts in his underwear while Winslow shovels coal and swabs the floors, and the sleepy bastard can't even be bothered to make his own bed. 

"I accounted for everything in the stores, sir. We got plenty," he says sullenly. "More than enough for four weeks."

"And it took ye how long to figure that out?" Wake grumbles, not moving, not deigning to look the lad in the eyes. He can sense the boy standing over him, feeling his poor posture and ill-temper, imagining the sour thoughts that must be coursing through the lad's mind. "The galley window's lookin' foggy, so enough lollygaggin'. I want ye to scrub it down and scrub it good until it shines like cut glass. Then I wants ye to do the same for all the windows of this here house until it sparkles. Are ye hearing me, lad?"

"Aye, aye, sir," Winslow says, every syllable pregnant with disdain. "Like crystal glasses laid out in the wardroom"

Wake has to chuckle at that. "Be gone with ye," he says, with not a small amount of fondness. 

Winslow mutters something not very fond under his breath and makes his leave. Wake counts his bootfalls and, when he estimates that Winslow has to be at or around the threshold, he rolls over and emits a low rumbler that, I'll be damned, seemingly echoes in the confined space. 

The sound of boot-soles against the floor terminates, replaced by Winslow swearing and making oaths. Right when Wake thinks the lad is about to stop and leave he raises his voice, demanding of him, "You says I was lollygagging?"

"As ye please."

A heavy silence. Winslow takes a deep breath and turns on his heel, slamming the door behind him. 

***

While Winslow's puffing and pouting outside by the boathouse, Wake's sitting at his fold-out desk, dutifully scribbling in his log book. He records the usual charges by candlelight—malingering and larking, negligence and impertinence—and he pauses mid-stroke, hesitating. There's a providential space in the margins for a concluding note. His pen is poised over the naked paper, waiting for the impulse to condemn. He licks his chapped lips, their pink corners spreading into a smile.

With broad strokes he includes a short addition:

_ Habitual self-abuse. _

**Author's Note:**

> If you told me last year that I'd be writing homoerotic fanfiction involving characters played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson - who were SNUBBED; George C. Scott was right about the Oscars and treated that show accordingly - I would've laughed. But then I watched The Lighthouse. I seriously want to to move to Maine now so I can wear a Guernsey sweater all year and wander up and down the beach forlornly because of this movie, but that's beside the point. I really enjoyed The Lighthouse, it just hit so many interests of mine all at once, and even more. It's aesthetic, aesthetic, aesthetic. Entrancing. And I really enjoyed the humor of it all. I've never been fond of movies that take themselves too seriously. 
> 
> I mean something like this probably did happen off-screen. There was so much emphasis on the two of them watching each other, and in that scene were Winslow reads Wake's complaints from the log book he literally reads aloud "self-abuse" and we all know what that is a euphemism for. So this is my recreation of what may have happened. If you want more sexy Dafoe I recommend Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA where he has a pretty good role (Is this my package?)


End file.
